I have over a dozen browser tabs open on Google Chrome right now. I could maybe close a few of these. But opening a bunch of tabs when you research a topic has its use: cross-checking the information you read and its sources. That’s why professional fact-checkers’ web browsers frequently fill up as they carefully comb through all of the claims in a news story. We could learn a thing or two from them. Proper fact-checking is crucial in academia and even in everyday reading, particularly in an era of rampant misinformation.
The chain of open tabs is the result of a fact-checking strategy called lateral reading. In this case, the reader scans multiple things at a time rather than completely reading just one piece of writing. Instead of bothering to stay on a single web page and read everything that source has to say, which is called vertical reading, fact-checkers usually jump to a new browser tab. Their goal is two-fold. First, they’re checking what other people on the web are saying about that source. If a web page unfamiliar to you has a bias, chances are that someone credible on the internet has called them out. Something like Wikipedia or Politifact could be a good first browser tab you open to learn about a source or the topic it’s covering.
Even credible people aspiring to be objective can make mistakes. That brings me to the second goal of lateral reading: cross-check the information presented by a source. Sure, we may trust a story in the New York Times. But instead of carefully reading that one piece, a more robust (and more efficient) approach to getting informed is to start hopping onto new tabs to check whether other sources, like NPR or Snopes, have said anything different.
The overall goal isn’t to find that one fact-checking website that’s the pinnacle of credibility (sadly, no such site exists). Rather, lateral reading tells us we should make a habit of jumping from tab to tab to check whether a variety of credible sources can confirm what we have read.
Academic research could benefit from this strategy, too. Unreliable sources of information aren’t just fake news sites and politically charged nonprofits. The prevalence of predatory journals ensures we must also be cognizant of the source of information. This is especially true when a literature review takes us outside our field, leading us to unfamiliar journals. Even within a paper from a reputable journal, though, there may be misconceptions. Skimming multiple research papers at a time can help you quickly weed out assertions in a single paper that end up being slightly wrong.
Several studies have shown that skilled lateral reading improves one’s ability to fact check. If you’re interested in honing that skill, there are free crash tutorials online about lateral reading. And yes, they do affirm my excessive browser tab use.
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